attachment

Having a pre-teenager in the house is a constant addition to my practice of non-attachment. There is so much I want to hold on to, so much I have to let go of. Just this morning, for example, when we needed her to find an overdue library DVD, Naomi put on her long suffering voice. “I am trying to eat my breakfast and get ready for school, which is the most important thing in the morning,” she told us, in an exasperated tone I recognise as mine. “You will just have to wait for a more appropriate time to be searching for things.”

I can actually feel my buttons being pressed. And the thing is, there are buttons all over the place on this one. There’s the don’t-you-use-that-tone-of-voice-with-your-mother button, there’s the don’t-shirk-your-responsibility button, there’s the oh-crap-am-I-so-obnoxious-when-I-say-those-words button. Some of them are about me, some are about her, some are about us.

I find that I am attached to SO many things right now. I am attached to her manners, to her thoughtfulness, to her helping around the house. I am wanting her to care less about brand name shoes and be more tolerant of my love for buying used clothes. I’m wanting her to be less focused on her stupid teen magazines and be more aware of the ways the world needs our assistance (and not another Disney band). I want her to be less demanding and more grateful for all the wonderful things in her world. I am attached to being the kind of mother who supports her kid and also the kind of mother who guides her kids toward something finer than they might be if left to their own devices. It turns out that when I come to Naomi, I am attached to everything.

And this is not the time for attachment, this is the time for separation. This is the time for letting this smart, beautiful young woman begin to find her way in the world. This is the time for showing up as the mother of a nearly-teenager, not as the mother of an almost-kid. The time for understanding that “Mom, I don’t want you to sing in front of any of my friends ever again,” is a way for her to control and name her own world, and not just a slam on me or a glossing over of the 11 years we’ve spent singing together.

I was shallow and brand-conscious when I was 11. I collected stupid girl magazines and talked too much on the phone with my friends. I wanted things my own way and cried when I didn’t get them. I was Naomi in my own way. I’ve turned out ok.

Now I have to be me in a new way (again and again in this parenting journey). I have to take her mood swings as the pattern of my life, a pattern I teach about in classes about development all over the world. I have to remember what I tell clients all the time—that I am not so much wanting particular behaviours from Naomi but particular thoughts and feelings about the world, and that wanting someone else to feel a particular way is a losing battle. It’s ok to demand that she set the table each night; it’s not ok for me to insist that she must want to set the table in order to contribute her share to the house. It’s ok for me to demand that she be respectful; it’s not ok for me to insist that she must feel respect for me all the time.

Last night I was cleaning up from dinner and she wanted to sit in my lap, and then, later she wanted to cuddle for a long time. In most circumstances, I’d have put her off until later—cuddling after work is done. Things are changing, though, and just because I’ll want to hold her later as much as I want to now does not mean she’ll be in that same space. So I stopped what I was doing and stood and held this little big girl, this child-woman nearly as tall as me, for as long as she wanted to hug. I tried to memorise the scent of her hair and her thin, growing body in my arms, remembering the scent of baby shampoo and slightly spoiled milk that was baby Naomi, the pudgy infant I thought I loved so hard that my heart would break. Soon she will be in a different phase and I’ll be holding a different version of Naomi, and my heart, older now, will still threaten to break with the surfeit of love.

This morning, mad at me because I would not walk home through the rain to pick up a permission slip she had left behind, she stormed off the last little way to school without a backward look. Everything in me screamed to go after her and tell her she couldn’t treat me like that. I have learnt that, at least in a momentary way, I can be as made of anger and indignation as I am of love.

I am attached to her being the same and I am attached to her growing. I am attached to her being her own person and to her being exactly as I want her to be. My attachments pull on me and cause me trouble, and in every instance my own ambivalence is mirrored and distorted by the many ways she is holding on to all the same complexities of growing up. And so I hold her when she wants to be held, and I let her storm off when she wants to be angry, and I try always to hold myself as she grows. When she was a toddler, beginning to show her strong-will and fiery personality, I used to stand over her crib at the end of a long hard day. “I love you for everything you are,” I’d whisper to her—and to me. “I love you for the good things and for the hard things and for every cell in your being because that is what makes you Naomi and that is just who I want you to be.” I tried then to remember that valuing a person for the fullness of who she was—for her faults as well as her gifts, for her weaknesses as well as her strengths—was the true measure of love. I want to hold on to that way of loving her, and the rest—my particular desires and hopes and impulses—is all just noise. Everything else is just my construction of shoulds. Now is the time to let go of my constructions and open my eyes to the person she is becoming. Perhaps that is a goal I could be attached to.